This study analyzes the transformation of legal consciousness associated with the process of globalization. It examines changing conceptions of injury and compensation in northern Thailand, where global economic and cultural flows have had a dramatic impact over the past twenty years. In their “injury narratives,” ordinary Thai people describe the harm they have suffered, the causes they identify, the issues of responsibility with which they struggle, the obligations and remedy systems they consider relevant, and the role of law as they perceive it. These accounts, as well as litigation records from the Chiangmai Provincial Court, suggest that a transformation of Thai legal consciousness has indeed occurred, but not in the direction one might have expected. Rather than embracing liberal legalism or conceptualizing their grievances in terms of rights, injury victims in post-globalization Thailand are now less inclined to perceive their experiences in legal terms and more inclined to rely on a new form of religious discourse in which Buddhist precepts justify the injured person's decision to refrain from the pursuit of compensation. This article offers an explanation of why globalization appears to have pushed legal consciousness in the direction of religiosity rather than rights.

In this article I place U.S. punishment trends in comparative context, seeking to show that the contemporary penal regime in the United States resembles patterns of governance prevalent throughout Latin America, the world's most economically unequal region. In both the U.S. and Latin America, I argue, neoliberal reforms have produced societies characterized by ever greater divides between the haves and have-nots, and state criminal justice institutions increasingly position themselves to police this boundary rather than mitigate its effects. In this article, I examine these trends through the lens of wars on crime and terrorism, arguing that in societies polarized between a dwindling set of haves and an ever more numerous (and potentially unruly) group of have-nots, an inexorable pull makes criminal justice institutions more aggressive in their enforcement of class and racial boundaries. Hallmarks include a widening of the criminal justice net (by broadening definitions of criminal activity, for example) and a deepening of the deprivations visited on those ensnared within it. The article concludes with reflections on the need for reconfiguring conceptions of human rights and their relation to security.